I had already started the learning process by organizing a tour of some of the best companies out there to find out exactly what it was that made them great. I went back to the Partners’ Council and asked them to help me study the best practices of the best companies we could find. We would then use then findings to strengthen our company.
- David Novak
Notable Quotables
We will rebuild, renew and remain the capital of the free world.
- Michael Bloomberg
E – Edge, ability to make tough yes and no decisions
- Jack Welch
You can either endure the difficult or do the difficult.
- Michael Levine
China is a government-oriented economy. No one can say he can run his business entirely without government connections. Anybody who says that he or she can do things alone… is a hypocrite.
- Wang Jianlin
You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
- Walt Disney
The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.
- Walt Disney
There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.
- Winston Churchill
When completed the new facility will have the capacity to accommodate approximately 3,000 staff.
- John Chambers
I really believed that I said then, and I still do. But we figured out a way to grow, and stay profitable, and there was no logical place to stop. The way I approached managing the business, I always tried to maintain a sense of hands-on, personal supervision – usually flying around to take a look at our stores on a regular basis. But from the very beginning, even on my paper routes in college, I have also been a delegator, trying to hire the best possible people to manage the stores. That’s been the case since back in Newport….We’re big now. We’re really big. That’s not something I like to focus on. I always wanted to be the best retailer in the world, not necessarily the biggest…(being big poses opportunities), but being big also poses big dangers. It has ruined many a fine company – including some giant retailers – who started out strong and got bloated or out of touch or were slow to react to the needs of their customers. Here’s the point: the biggest Wal-Mart gets, the more essential it is that we think small. Because that is exactly how we have become a big corporation.
- Sam Walton
The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.
- Winston Churchill
China remains a market with unprecedented potential.
- Cheng Yu-tung
I founded Netflix. I’ve built it steadily over 12 years now, first with DVD becoming profitable in 2002, a head-to-head ferocious battle with Blockbuster and evolving the company toward streaming.
- Reed Hastings
Extraordinary results are directlydetermined by how narrow you can make your focus.
- Gary Keller
Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.
- Dale Carnegie
Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealously. The shadow of greed, that is.
- Yoda
Nike is not about going to a ball game. It’s a business.
- Phil Knight
What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.
- Winston Churchill
Research indicates that employees have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company.
- Zig Ziglar
After I met my partner, Mr. Protherow, we decided to start a banking project, and at the same time we started to think already about a business on a bigger scale. At the very beginning we thought more about gaining money, to have a normal life with our families, etc.
- Vladimir Potanin
You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.
- Joel Olsteen
Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.
- Bill Gates
We believe our growth rate indicates that Cisco continues to gain market share against our traditional competitors in most product sectors.
- John Chambers
The Dip creates scarcity, scarcity creates value.
- Seth Godin
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture – I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
- Reid Hoffman
You’ve got to embrace what you don’t know.
- Sara Blakely
Deadlines aren’t bad. They help you organize your time. They help you set priorities. They make you get going when you might not feel like it.
- Harvey Mackay
Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.
- Seth Godin
About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.
- Reed Hastings
If we don’t allow ourselves to make mistakes, we will never invest in things that are radical.
- Jeff Clavier
What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.
- Bill Gates
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
How can I create something that critics will criticize?
- Seth Godin
If the broadcasters were to win on their claims, they’d outlaw the DVR.
- Charles Ergen
I’m a storyteller. I love to tell stories about brands. I love to tell stories, period. I like painting pictures through the words, and that’s what I do.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Disruption is like an earthquake. Disruption has no purpose. It has not values. It has no organizing principle. It has no direction and it has no leadership… This is not what we want to bring into the world. What we want to bring into the world is revolution.
- Jack Dorsey
Money doesn’t make people happy. People make people happy.
- Stephen Wynn
I think many start-ups make mistakes because they are focusing on things that are farther ahead, and they haven’t done the work that has built the foundation to support it.
- Howard Schultz
Encouragement and hope are the two most powerful qualities any person can provide to others.
- Zig Ziglar
Your story is a symphony, not a note.
- Seth Godin
In the end, the customer doesn’t know, or care, if you are small or large as an organization. She or he only focuses on the garmenthanging on the rail in the store.
- Giorgio Armani
Potential means that you haven’t done it yet.
- David Novak
If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
- Bill Gates
Play by the rules, but be ferocious.
- Phil Knight
A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
- Steve Martin
Lack of Self-Discipline.
- Napoleon Hill
Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.
- Peter Drucker
I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.
- Sam Walton
Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.
- Bill Gates
Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that’s fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.
- Bryan Adams
I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.
- Bill Gates
When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.
- Larry Ellison
The very important thing you should have is patience.
- Jack Ma
Every noteworthy achievement met with some sort of temporary setback before success came.
- Napoleon Hill
Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others…He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds – or on persons devoted to them – have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a ‘dirty little atheist’ he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with ‘The Rights of Man’ he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But ‘The Age of Reason’ cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen – a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad.The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty – who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause – can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.
- Thomas Edison
It’s so easy to tweet from wherever you are.
- Jack Dorsey
[B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell — a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great — was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing — namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. . . Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence — which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favour of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for would be not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that.
- Winston Churchill
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.
- Alexander Graham Bell
We don’t live in a normal world, we live under a power law.
- Peter Thiel
I think there’s plenty of room for blogs that exist to pay the blogger, or blogs that exist to turn a profit. That’s just not the kind of blog I’m writing, and I’m not the kind of blogger that could do that.
- Seth Godin
I grew up in a house where my father encouraged my brother and me to fail. I specifically remember coming home and saying, ‘Dad, Dad, I tried out for this or that and I was horrible,’ and he would high-five me and say, ‘Way to go.’
- Sara Blakely
Did you eat half an Oreo cookie? No problem. If you’re a 220-pound male, you just need to climb 27 flights of stairs to burn it off.
- Timothy Ferriss
Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses – it’s progressing. Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set.
- Bill Gates
Thus far then have we travelled along the terrible road we chose at the call of duty. The mood of Britain is wisely and rightly averse from every form of shallow or premature exultation. This is no time for boasts or glowing prophecies, but there is this: A year ago our position looked forlorn, and well nigh desperate to all eyes but our own. To-day we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: ‘We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.
- Winston Churchill
Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn’t really bother me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.
- Winston Churchill
Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.
- Peter Thiel
The higher the level of leadership people want to reach, the greater the sacrifices they will have to make?
- John Maxwell
A company is like a shark, it either has to move forward or it dies.
- Larry Ellison
When I was 7, I came up with the idea of ‘charm socks.’ My mom would take me to buy bags of plastic charms, we would sew them on frilly white socks, and I sold them at school.
- Sara Blakely
Tweeting is really only good for one thing – it’s just good for tweeting… It is rewarding, because it’s just its own reward. It’s sort of like heaven.
- Steve Martin
Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Pick people who are interested in what you’re interested in.
- Russell Simmons
I meet people overseas that know five languages – that the only language I’m comfortable in is English.
- Bill Gates
A man without a smiling face must not open a shop.
- Dale Carnegie
How you get up in the morning will play a big part in how high you go up in life.
- Zig Ziglar
If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
- Peter Thiel
If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.
- Steve Jobs
Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
- Steve Jobs
If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that’s a good discussion. Maybe that’s the way to help close the deficit.
- Bill Gates
The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.
- Andrew Carnegie
Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That’s why there’s the old saw: location, location, location.
- Jeff Bezos
Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.
- John C. Maxwell
My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It’s their work that I’m supporting. So it’s not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.
- George Soros
Focus on something the customer wants, and then deliver it. “ 14. “Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity.
- Sam Walton
I believe you should have a world where you’ve got to license something at a fair price. There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone. I wish Apple would use them and could use them, and I don’t know if Samsung would stop us.
- Steve Wozniak
Hedgehog Concept—disciplined action, following from disciplined people who exercise disciplined thought.
- James C. Collins
You can achieve difficult things, but you can’t achieve the impossible.
- Peter Thiel
We’d like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers.
- Seth Godin
Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.
- Zig Ziglar
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
- Winston Churchill
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
- Steve Jobs
The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
- Peter Thiel
Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.
- James C. Collins
I think the move by Mr. Greenspan was welcomed by everyone here.
- Jack Welch
Know your numbers’ is a fundamental precept of business.
- Bill Gates
A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.
- Jerry Seinfeld
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
- Winston Churchill
The reason I was able to grow my business was that every day, after producing 30 minutes of wine television, I spent 15 hours a day replying to every single person’s e-mail and every single person’s Twitter @ reply.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Appreciation – Learn to give flowers while people are still living.
- Joel Olsteen
